Lightroom Essentials

Lesson 14 of 34

Crop and Straighten Images

Lightroom Essentials

Lesson 14 of 34

Crop and Straighten Images

Lesson Info

Crop and Straighten Images

I was following a lot until you switched over and started talking about how you can apply things on import, so I just wanted to clarify if I'm understanding how setting default really works when you set the default for color calibration and lens correction that happens when you pull up an image to start working on it or it's something that you have to take another action to apply great questions. So if you set any of these developed settings as a default, they're goingto happen automatically. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to apply an import preset nothing. They just occur always, always, always, always if you don't want them to always occur, let's, say you're shooting with different models of cameras that you like different profiles for. Then you would not set that as a default. You set it up is a pre set that you can access in the import dialog box. That makes sense. Okay, okay. Yeah, one from, uh, a handful of folks on the internet are asking are saying my only profil...

e option is embedded. You know what that was? Next thing I'm going to say lisa's dancing because you're looking at a j peg well, great. Yeah, so we talked a little bit about that yesterday. The flexibility of shooting and raw format in your camera is you get a little bit more editing flexibility, things like white balance and things like color camera calibration profiles. You can't change those on a jape, eh? They're they're baked in because your camera is applying a little bit of processing in camera that's kind of baked in always my latest favorite analogy for explaining raw format versus j peg is raw is like the raw cookie ingredients j paying is like a baked cookie. Thanks perfect, because while you're dealing with the raw ingredients, you've got more flexibility, I can decide to put those pecans in or not, I can decide to put those chocolate chips in or not, but if you're dealing with a base cookie, what can you do with it? You can frost the darn thing right? Maybe asking sprinkles to it, you know, but there's, not a whole ian cut it up into different shapes, so there's not as much flexibility with the baked cookie as there is with the raw ingredients. So that's what I like to shoot raw because I can do things like change the white balance, which we're going to look at in a little bit, as well as changing camera calibration, so excellent questions smc s when you activate the set default feature in the camera calibration and one's correction section is setting up for each section or is it for the entire profile? Fabulous question. So what we've got over here? We're in the developed module in all these different panels have different settings in them can you know that we can collapse and expand them when you hold down that option? Chiana, mac or altana pc and you choose said his default light room goes into every one of these panels and captures the settings. So that's, why it's very important to hit the reset button down here that reset button down there before you set as a default? Because let's say let's say I did that right now, my default would capture that bleach bypass edit, which I don't I want that, and I wouldn't think that you would want it on every single picture I mean, but that would be something that you could set as a preset so that you can access it when you want it versus sitting in is a default. This is gonna happen as a matter of course, so light room does look at it every setting in these panels that's why we're going to click reset, and then at least in my humble opinion, you'd really only want to apply camera calibration and lens correction on a global basis, but even so, let's say you had some other settings in these other panels. Well, when you go to create the preset by pressing shift command in our shift control in on a pc, then you just turn all that other stuff off you'd say check none and then he'd only turn on process version calibration, linds profile chromatic aberration. So even if you forgot to click the reset button, just make sure uncheck all that other stuff and then that won't be captured in the pre set, but if you said it is the default than all of that stuff is captured, so summing since okay, it is a little bit confusing, teo understand preset versus default, but I think we're all getting it now, okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and use my history panel over here on the left hand side and again, I'm getting this opening and closing behavior from my panel's because I'm in so low mode and I got into seoul, emma by pressing by option clicking the panel name or ault clicking the panel name on the pc. And when you do that, your triangles look like they're filled with little dots instead of solid, so if I step back one step in my history panel now, I'm I'm back teo where I want to be okay the next thing we're going to do is we're gonna talk about cropping and straightening your images, and it is oh, so easy here in light room, so I'm going to go back to the library so I can find another image for us to play with. Or I could access another image down here in my film strip, and the reason my film strip is opening closing automatically is because it's in solo mode and you know that because it's got that daughter turn angle. If you want to get out of it, just press op option our ault and click that triangle tio change that behavior so we could either press g to go back to the library module in grid view to choose another image to work with. But it's, just a z z to go down here to our film strip because we can see all of the images that are in that collection that we made so let's single click an image and you'll see that change here on screen. There we go. All right, close up my history pale just so it's not distracting over there now, let's, come up, tio the top right of the panel set on the right hand side you'll see a history and panel we're going to talk a little bit more about that here in a few minutes maybe in the next segment but I'm gonna have that clothes just for the moment beneath your history graham you've got a row of tools isn't this fabulous six tools instead of how many tools and photo shot oh hundred so wiring is far less overwhelming at least in my opinion, so we've got five tools to work with this is where they live right here the first one if you point your mouse cursor to any of these lightning will give you a little tip and tell you what the heck they are and also give you their keyboard shortcut so the keeper shark it for the crop tool, which is also where we do our straightening is our so as soon as we press our or you could just click the tool itself, then we have options for that tool appear right here directly beneath that little bitty toolbar. Now when we finish using any of these tools, you have to put them back so you'd click it again and that collapses the tools options you can think of if you're used to using photoshopped you can think of this as the options bar in photo shop, so you put the toll away to close up those off oceans, move onto something else okay, so while we have the crop to active let's, look at some of the options we've got. I'm gonna go ahead and close just this left hand panel. So we've got more screen real estate here, so we've got the crop tool activated. We have an aspect ratio poppet menu to the right over here by default light room wants to constrain your crop. Teo the aspect ratio of the original image and aspect ratio is just the relationship between wits and haif, but you've got all these options right here and you can also enter custom presets if you find yourself cropping to a specific aspect ratio often that happens not to be in here. This one is a little bit odd, though I mean, it works just like the other presets. However, the presets air going to appear right here and you can only have five of them. I don't know why and there's, no way to manage them like you can't just delete one of them, you kind of got to populate it. So if you found yourself doing the same crop aspect ratio over and over and maybe maybe there were five different ones that you need, they need wantto enter them like one right after the other, and as you enter them, they make another one of the one of the built in presets fall off so you need to populate them there's no way to go in and really, like, manage that little list, but this is where your your presets will appear or actually right underneath this one between only and five presets, so if you wanted to change just one of them, you'd kind of have to rebuild him to make him overwrite what's there and fall off that list it's very strange, but anyway, that's the deal. So this little padlock icon to the right of the aspect ratio menu menu just let you choose you know which one you want to roll with all the time, so you can just lock it. If you want teo, change this to something else, you can just click the unlock button and then you can light rain is not going to try to restrict your crop. You khun distraught the crop box whatever side you want, but it tries to help you out and keep it true to the picture's original aspect ratio, so you'll notice a soon as we pressed, are to go into the crops that we got this nice, beautiful crop overlay with this handy rule of thirds grid I remember it wasn't too long ago in photo shop, we didn't even have this overlay, and if you wanted a rule of thirds grid, which just helps you create more visually pleasing compositions by positioning your focal point on one of the intersecting points of the line I like to think this is a tick tack toe grid so you want your focal point to be somewhere on one of those intersections toe having more visually pleasing position but we had to draw a grid using the vector shaped tools and photo shop because we had no crop great oh yeah it's awful awful thie battle days but here in light room you have this nice grid and if you tap the okey oh for overlay you can cycle through several different kinds of grids you could even get this one. This is like the golden mean, so this taffy oki and that'll cycle through the overlays when you find the one that you want to use to stop tapping, so this is a handy one. This one gives you a visual indication of where the crop would happen should you choose a certain aspect ratio, so that could be handy for visualization, especially if you're dealing with clients that can't really visualize that you can say, oh, well, it would be crop like this if we did that, you know teo to do that aspect ratio of that size, then we need to take a little bit off the edges are a little bit off the top or whatever and look about like that so that could be a handy one just keep tapping the ok, you need to see there's, oodles and gobs of crop overlays now down at the bottom when you've got a tool active over here on the right hand side, you're gonna have a little poppet menu of like two or three tool settings, so down here we can see if we click this little poppet menu so it says tulle overlay and will be at the bottom left then you can choose to show this overlay always, which is light rooms default setting never if you don't give a care about the crop overlay and you just want to see your image without that that grin on top of it or you can choose otto now I like to roll with auto because what that means is I don't get the overlay until I actually click the crop box toe actually make change, so if I turn it to auto, see how the grid's gone, but the second I click on any of the corner handles to start affecting the crop, then the overly appears so again that's choosing the crop tool tulle overlay at the bottom left and choosing auto instead of always and in the second you start to drag these handles, then you get that grid, so I'm not holding down any modifier keys at all in light room is constraining mycroft box to the original photos aspect ratio and why is that again? Because we've chosen it over here as shot which is also by default and it's locked when you're ready to accept the crop all you do is press return or enter or click the done button down at the bottom right and that's it easy peasy now what if I want to change crop press art activate the crop tool look at that the edges of my original image are sitting right there you can always get back to them now your next question is going to be well what if I wantto do two different crops on that image created virtual copy crop each one differently? We're going to be using virtual copies little bit later on today, but what we could do is the keyboard shortcut is command apostrophe or control apostrophe and that just creates a second virtual copy so it's like an alias it's another shortcut or pointer to that original image and that would allow us to have two copies of this image where we could have two different crops instead of having to come in and undo the original crops change it that way you could have two different crop hanging around let's say I want to put this image on a website or I wantto you know, crop it down a little bit more maybe to go in an advertisement then you could do that way, that does bring me to the point yesterday we had the question about virtual copies and light room with if you because all the changes you're making to these to the photo records is stored in the catalog if your catalog were to crash or become corrupted for some reason, then you wouldn't have your edits to your images because they live in the catalog database not in the images metadata but you can push the edits to the images metadata by either turning on a preference that we looked at yesterday or by at the end of your editing session selecting all your images in the library by pressing commander control a for select all and then just saving pressing command s or control s and that is emmanuelle push to make the metadata to push your edits into the file itself so if you know everything goes to heck in a handbasket you don't have to start over yesterday we had the question what happens when you have virtual copies does where does that meta data go? Doesn't go anywhere and unfortunately, uh, metadata it's my understanding that that stays in the light room catalogue so you cannot you're not goingto end up with your virtual copy information if something were to happen to your light room catalogue so that virtual copy information stays in the catalogue and once you start dealing with virtual copies you can have, you'll have a master image, which light room considers to be the master, and then all the virtual copies that matter data stays in the catalog, but it's the masters information or edits that goes into the metadata when you choose to do that. So I just wanted to address that since we had that yesterday, we start really quick, a quick, simple but definitely essential question, carly asked. Is there a way to keep the dimensions but make it a portrait crop instead of landscape? That is an absolutely fabulous question press the x key. So as I tapped the ex key, I go from, uh, portrait to landscape so that's a really anyone all right, so I'm gonna go ahead and draw that crop box out another little tip for you when you're adjusting the corner handles of your crop boxes. Notice how right now I've got hold of the bottom right handle and but the others, the top left handle isn't changing. What if I wanted to draw the crowd box from the center out, you'd use a modifier key and it's option on a macro altana pc. So now with me holding down option or all, look what happens, see how I'm re sizing it from the center out, so that's a handy one to have it. Dragon trace it'll just save you, like, three seconds every time you use the tool. But those three seconds over the course of three hundred sixty five days will add up to an entire day. Okay, so let's say we're done cropping this image so we're gonna go ahead impress return. Isn't that comforting that you go back to the crop till any time and change the crop? I mean, really that's good stuff right there. Okay, let's, go to another image. Somebody come down here to my photo been and we can also use the crop chill to zoom in so let's, take a peek at this image. This is one of my favorite hawaiian slack key guitarist his name is sterling. He just came out with his first album on january first. I'll show you where to get that later. I love me that we play hawaiian music all the time, it's just so wonderful. Okay, so here you can see the original image versus my crop box in case you can see that what I did was just crop into the image to kind of make a fake zoom. I'm not zooming. I mean, I'm not really changing the the pixels here, I'm just changing the crops so it looks like I'm zoomed in farther onto my my subject than I am in my husband jay knows all about sternly he's always with me when we see him so it's okay that I'm certainly is number one groupie okay, so now let's find another image here in our photo bin and I want to show you how to straighten your image is so here we have an image have a paddle border in silhouette. It was crazy crazy early that morning and this guy actually will do yoga on that pile bored out there in the ocean and we just sit there on the balcony and just we can't believe it. We're like show off, so but it's very cricket as you can see here, so what we can do is use the crop tool to straighten it as well. So we're going to go back to the crop tool and you can see over here on the right hand side that we've got an angle slider, the icon looks like a little level don't mess with that thing. I mean, you can you can do this man and that'll rotate your image, but what I like to do is going to reset this. What I like to do is apply the call up he straightened tool while I'm in the crop tool, so any time you have the crop till active, you can grab hold of this little level over here within your image by pressing the command key or control key on a pc. Once you do that, all you have to do is continue holding down that modifier key, and then you're just going to draw a line across what really should be straight and light room will rotate it just enough. Okay, so let's make this a little bit more cricket so we can go back and fix it. Okay, so let's say that was the original shot, so we come up here and either grab the crop told by clicking and overpricing our and now instead of messing around with this angle slider, you know your mouse is probably over here anyway, because you've wisely used keyboard shortcuts to be faster in your editing and you've downloaded that free cheat sheet, then we can this press and hold the commands chiana mac or control chiana pc, and that activates that angle on image control, and then we just draw a line doesn't matter how long the line is, and it'll work vertically versus horizontally. Draw a line across what should be straight release your mouse button and the modifier keone light room rotates your image just enough were that it straight so that thing anything press return when you're done, and theoretically, you should end up with a far shorter image.

Class Description

Ready to take control of your photo library and actually enjoy image processing? Join best-selling author and image-editing/stock expert Lesa Snider for a comprehensive three-day immersion into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Lesa will cover everything you need to know about importing, managing, and correcting images using Lightroom's non-destructive workspace. You'll learn how to apply global changes to photos, how to target specific areas for more selective changes, and how to apply changes to multiple photos en masse. You'll also learn how to fix skies, retouch portraits, remove sensor spots and other objects, as well as when and how to switch over to Photoshop (or Elements) for more difficult tasks. Lesa will also show you how to sharpen like a pro (with nods to specific settings for submitting stock imagery), export your photos, apply a wide variety of practical effects, share images via social media networks, add location data, build photo books, create sizzling slideshows, customize print layouts, create gorgeous web galleries, and much more.

By the end of this course, you'll be in love with Photoshop Lightroom and you'll have mastered the art of photo management and non-destructive editing.

Peter West Photo

I am a photographer and photo teacher in the Greater Toronto Area. Along with my private clients I am often asked to teach photography classes to the larger photo clubs in the region. I've got a big three-night class coming up on LR in the spring so I thought I'd best check-in with Lesa to see if I was missing anything. LOL learned so much about little timesavers that I bought the course. :) This isn't my first Lightroom course either. Lesa is teaching exactly what the newcomer needs and offers tons of tips for pros. Lisa's explanation of how LR actually works is worth the price of the course alone if you're new to this fabulous database and editing program! As for Lesa she's a wonderful teacher and has a great way of explaining some of technical challenges we all run into when editing. If you're a pro, you'll recoup the price of the course when you edit your next big job.

Jean

Wonderful class! I had privately hired someone to teach me about Lightroom, but ultimately, I was unable to understand what Lightroom was capable of or how to navigate it. By the end of the first five sessions with Lesa, I knew I had finally found someone who was capable of teaching Lightroom in a clear and cohesive way. I am so thankful to CreativeLive and to Lesa for putting together instructional courses like this so that I can move forward with my passion for photography and use the tools that others have mastered. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

a Creativelive Student

Amazing, amazing course -- got off to a fantastic start with lightroom thanks to this -- its packed with tips and timesavers, and gets you from photos on a stick to the finish and even a web page if you like...